Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1993, Side 104

102
Pétur Knútsson
‘lord’ and later Danish or Low German loans such as kafteinn ‘captain’
have achieved native status (see below, section 7.1), while modem
colloquial loans, chiefly from English, occur in increasing numbers, in
spite of a strong academic and literary purist attitude which seeks to
promote Icelandic neologisms to replace them. Thus kassetta ‘compact
cassette’ and videó ‘video (recorder)’ are normal colloquial usage,
while the corresponding Icelandicisms snælda and myndband(stœki)
belong to a rather more formal register.
Thus it is largely within this more formal register that the problem of
foreign polysyllabic morphemes asserts itself today, and this would not
on the face of it appear to be a suitable breeding-ground for the “adap-
tive and contaminative” effects of Bloomfield’s “popular etymology”.
Yet as we shall see shortly (sections 4.2 and 5.1), it is here within the
formal register that a distinct tendency to indulge in word play emerges.
2.2 English
Bloomfield’s discussion centres on English, however, which al-
though starting out with the same monosyllabic morpheme structure
as Icelandic, now swarms with polysyllabic morphemes. The general
weakening of unstressed syllables created a situation whereby it was
no longer always possible to attach a meaning to each syllable, and this
doubtless facilitated the influx of polysyllabic morphemes after the Old
English period. In modem English, new polysyllabic loanwords with
monomorphemic structure, such as kibbutz and glasnost, are simply
added to the already vast stock of comparable native words such as
rabbit and concrete.
I think however that most native English speakers would agree that
kibbutz and glasnost do in fact sound more “foreign” than rabbit and
concrete. This is doubtless a result of a number of factors, one of
which is probably our awareness of the nationality of their referents.
But Bloomfield’s concept of “unintelligible structure” is, I suggest,
not one of these factors. Phonemically these words are composed of
normal English syllables, as becomes clear if we compare kibbutz
/ki’buts/ with kinetic /ki'netik/, books /buks/ and foots /futs/. In the